Alan: The Greek word "skhole," whence the English word "school" is derived, means "leisure."
An Aside: Pieper's book, "Leisure, The Basis Of Culture," was a mainstay at the University of Toronto when I studied there in the sixties.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher's Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism
"We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come," Alan Watts observed in 1970, aptly declaring us "a civilization which suffers from chronic disappointment." Two millennia earlier, Aristotle asserted: "This is the main question, with what activity one's leisure is filled."
Today, in our culture of productivity-fetishism, we have succumbed to the tyrannical notion of "work/life balance"and have come to see the very notion of "leisure" not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged, or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy. And yet the most significant human achievements between Aristotle's time and our own – our greatest art, the most enduring ideas of philosophy, the spark for every technological breakthrough – originated in leisure, in moments of unburdened contemplation, of absolute presence with the universe within one's own mind and absolute attentiveness to life without, be it Galileo inventing modern timekeeping after watching a pendulum swing in a cathedral or Oliver Sacks illuminating music's incredible effects on the mind while hiking in a Norwegian fjord.
So how did we end up so conflicted about cultivating a culture of leisure?
In 1948, only a year after the word "workaholic" was coined in Canada and a year before an American career counselor issued the first concentrated countercultural clarion call for rethinking work, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture (public library) – a magnificent manifesto for reclaiming human dignity in a culture of compulsive workaholism, triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss
Decades before the great Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast came to contemplate why we lost leisure and how to reclaim it, Pieper traces the notion of leisure to its ancient roots and illustrates how astonishingly distorted, even inverted, its original meaning has become over time: The Greek word for "leisure," σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school – our institutions of learning, presently preparation for a lifetime of industrialized conformity, were once intended as a mecca of "leisure" and contemplative activity. Pieper writes:
The original meaning of the concept of "leisure" has practically been forgotten in today's leisure-less culture of "total work": in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.
[...]The very fact of this difference, of our inability to recover the original meaning of "leisure," will strike us all the more when we realize how extensively the opposing idea of "work" has invaded and taken over the whole realm of human action and of human existence as a whole.
The Etymology Of "School"
Pieper traces the origin of the paradigm of the "worker" to the Greek Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, a friend of Plato's and a disciple of Socrates. Being the first to equate effort with goodness and virtue, Pieper argues, he became the original "workaholic":
Illustration from Herman and Rosie by Gus Gordon
Work in contemporary culture encompasses "hand work," which consists of menial and technical labor, and "intellectual work," which Pieper defines as "intellectual activity as social service, as contribution to the common utility." Together, they compose what he calls "total work" – "a series of conquests made by the 'imperial figure' of the 'worker'" as an archetype pioneered by Antisthenes. Under the tyranny of total work, the human being is reduced to a functionary and her work becomes the be-all-end-all of existence. Pieper considers how contemporary culture has normalized this spiritual narrowing:
The answer to this rhetorical question requires a journey to another turning point in the history of our evolving – or, as it were, devolving – understanding of "leisure."
Echoing Kierkegaard's terrific defense of idleness as spiritual nourishment, Pieper writes:
Echoing Kierkegaard's terrific defense of idleness as spiritual nourishment, Pieper writes:
[...]Idleness, for the older code of behavior, meant especially this: that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity... The metaphysical-theological concept of idleness means, then, that man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness has seized him in the face of the divine Goodness that lives within him.
Saint Appolonia And A Hundred Medieval Holidays (A Contraction Of "Holy Days")
We see glimmers of this recognition today, in sorely needed yet still-fringe notions like the theology of rest, but Pieper points to the Latin word acedia – loosely translated as "despair of listlessness" – as the earliest and most apt formulation of the complaint against this self-destructive state. He considers the counterpoint:
[...]Leisure, then, is a condition of the soul – (and we must firmly keep this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like "breaks," "time off," "weekend," "vacation," and so on – it is a condition of the soul) – leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image for the "worker."
Illustration from The Lion and the Bird by Marianne Dubuc
But Pieper's most piercing insight, one of tremendous psychological and practical value today, is his model of the three types of work – work as activity, work as effort, and work as social contribution – and how against the contrast of each a different core aspect of leisure is revealed. He begins with the first:
In a sentiment Pico Iyer would come to echo more than half a century later in his excellent treatise on the art of stillness, Pieper adds:
But there is something else, something larger, in this conception of leisure as "non-activity" – an invitation to commune with the immutable mystery of being. Pieper writes:
[...]Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and "go under," almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go... The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery – is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep?
This passage calls to mind Jeanette Winterson's beautiful meditation on art as a function of "active surrender" – a parallel quite poignant in light of the fact that leisure is the seedbed of the creative impulse, absolutely necessary for making art and doubly so for enjoying it.
Pieper turns to the second face of work, as acquisitive effort or industriousness, and how the negative space around it silhouettes another core aspect of leisure:
Alan: As a Latin Americanist who lives "south of the border" for significant chunks of every year, I have come to realize that Americans see their life-mission as work -- nearly non-stop work. Hispanics on the other hand perceive their mission as continual celebration of Life.
With this, Pieper turns to the third and final type of work, that of social contribution:
The simple "break" from work – the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer – is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The "break" is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide "new strength" for "new work," as the word "refreshment" indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.
Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process... Leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it; leisure in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work... Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of "refreshment" will experience its authentic fruit, the deep refreshment that comes from a deep sleep.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
To reclaim this higher purpose of leisure, Pieper argues, is to reclaim our very humanity – an understanding all the more urgently needed today, in an era where we speak of vacations as "digital detox" – the implication being that we recuperate from, while also fortifying ourselves for, more zealous digital retox, so to speak, which we are bound to resume upon our return.
He writes:
Alan: We imperil ourselves when we forget, deny or ignore that "the whole is always (unnpredictably) greater than the sum of its parts" which is why "the whole of existence" must be treated with the reverence reserved for Deity even in the event that "the whole of existence" is not Deity.
This is why the ability to be "at leisure" is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, and the ability to uplift one's spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work...
Alan: A fundamental purpose of modern (and post-modern) civilization is to reify human beings; to deprive them of personhood, to make them into "things" that are more readily reduced to servo-mechanisms of automata.In leisure ... the truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the "just human" is left behind... [But] the condition of utmost exertion is more easily to be realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even though the latter is effortless: this is the paradox that reigns over the attainment of leisure, which is at once a human and super-human condition.
The Etymology Of The Word "Reify"
(In similar vein, the word "functionary" seemingly refers to a person -- typically a person of social-and-economic standing -- whereas the fundamental intent of this nomenclature is to deprive human beings of personhood by reducing them to their "function," which is to replacxe the primacy of their "being" with their derivative - and secondary - "doing.")
This, perhaps, is why when we take a real vacation – in the true sense of "holiday," time marked by holiness, a sacred period of respite – our sense of time gets completely warped. Unmoored from work-time and set free, if temporarily, from the tyranny of schedules, we come to experience life exactly as it unfolds, with its full ebb and flow of dynamism – sometimes slow and silken, like the quiet hours spent luxuriating in the hammock with a good book; sometimes fast and fervent, like a dance festival under a summer sky.
Leisure, the Basis of Culture is a terrific read in its totality, made all the more relevant by the gallop of time between Pieper's era and our own. Complement it with David Whyte on reconciling the paradox of "work/life balance," Pico Iyer on the art of stillness, Wendell Berry on the spiritual rewards of solitude, and Annie Dillard on reclaiming our everyday capacity for joy and wonder.
No comments:
Post a Comment